


A Lighthouse

by th_esaurus



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 15:36:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15933398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: “We wasted so much damn time despising one another,” Francis murmured, suddenly rueful.“I never despised you,” James said simply. His face, as it always seemed to be these days, was terribly open. “You merely made it so hard for people to like you.”





	A Lighthouse

He could scarcely remember the last time he had walked for pleasure. Certainly not that half-mile slog between _Terror_ and _Erebus;_  that was always duty, or worse. His strolls with Sophia - St James’, mainly, though twice they borrowed Sir John’s handsome little pony trap and made the trek to Kew, for Sophia loved the greenhouses - they were always fraught with ulterior motive, although courtship was its own kind of pleasure. The last he could truly recall was hiking across Castlewellan as a young man, with his father and a pair of sturdy walking sticks. It must have been before he met Captain Parry. He recalled his father stopping often, as his legs by then were failing him, though he always made a fine excuse for it by inhaling the crisp morning air and casting his gaze across the autumnal greenery, as though he were helpless to admire the view.

“And yet you say nothing of our jaunt to the cairn?”

“Don’t act the fool, James, it does not become you.”

James was walking beside him, matching his slow pace. He had no need to: Francis was burdened by thick furs, thicker boots, the depth of the snow, the heft of his sled. James seemed weightless in his uniform, neat as ever, hands clasped behind his back, traversing the snow as though it were nothing more than cut grass or pavement. Best walker in the Navy, Francis thought.

James accompanied him more often than not, these days, on his hunts.

He never quite noticed when James fell into step with him, only that he was not there, and then he was. He had a difficult time keeping track of James when he was changing terrain - clambering out of bed, packing up his tupiq, or if the weather should turn. But once Francis had found his stride and made progress across the shale, James would be there.

He could not yet hunt seal without a mentor. Late age had made him a slow learner, and he had relied too much on Thomas to read the ice. Instead, Francis fished with bait and a spear. “Quite a dab hand at that,” James observed once.

“No ice fishing in Ireland,” Francis muttered, setting his lure. “But I learnt the trick of it under Ross, when he in his infinite wisdom decided rationing would lower morale.”

“Men who have never been hungry seem to think starvation is a wonderful motivator.”

“Is that your good opinion, or mine?” Francis asked wryly.

James could only smile, his chin low to his collar.

Francis never held a grudge that James could not help him haul. His sled was built for one, even with the load of his catch: he would rather James strode ahead, upright and constant, guiding Francis home.

There were no stars to read in the daytime, but the shine of James’ buttons, the twinkle of his golden epaulettes in the hazy sun, were markers enough. Homeward bound.

*

He had considered James little more than a _fata morgana_ at first. Wiser men than Francis Crozier had fallen prey to them in the flat boredom of King William Land: seen false distant masts and crowed of rescue, mapped topography that turned out to be folly. Why should he not see, in the corner of his gaze, the silhouette of a fallen friend?

He spoke, haltingly, to the women, as they sewed amautiit for the children who were outgrowing theirs; they liked to share jokes and stories over their chores, and while his vocabulary was increasingly robust, his accent made the little ones titter.

The ice was to be respected, one of them told him; not to be trusted.

There are plenty of ghosts in the aurora, another one said. Perhaps his friend had lost his way?

“How am I to know?” Francis wondered, not entirely genuine.

They were amused by him. Ask, they said.

*

James said nothing until Francis offered the first word; and then at once they were conversing like old friends again. James picking up half-told anecdotes as though they were trading stories over dinner. His voice, as familiar as the wind had become, made something in Francis’ chest cease to ache.

A fading of pain he had not even known was there.

*

James was, at first, an isolated phenomenon. He kept Francis company on lonelier stretches, telling familiar myths of hubris and heroism. To hear James repeat his stories was nothing new, but something pragmatic in Francis knew that he would never imagine James saying a thing that hadn’t already come out of his mouth. “I have doomed myself to your tall tales for the rest of eternity,” Francis complained, and James simply scoffed.

“We can safely assume you craved them,” he said, dismissive, “hence--” and here, he gestured to himself. Clean and unsullied, his skin clear and bright, his eyes without a speck of blood to sunder them.

“I’m being punished,” Francis said, amused now. “Forced to repent for my unjustified decades of surliness against you.”

“Well, you have always flung yourself headfirst into purgatory, Francis.”

“ _Hah,_ ” Francis barked, dryly.

Some minutes passed between them in silence. The mirage was remarkably solid. No matter how much he stared at James, his vision of the man never faltered.

“We wasted so much damn time despising one another,” Francis murmured, suddenly rueful.

“I never despised you,” James said simply. His face, as it always seemed to be these days, was terribly open. “You merely made it so hard for people to like you.”

It was when James first appeared in the village that Francis felt a shudder of concern for his state of mind. On the fringes of it at first, as though waiting for an invitation, and then Francis began to see him day to day, too tall and with a different gait than the people Francis had long become used to around him. He sat with them in the biggest of the snow houses, around the fires and feasting, watching with a polite curiosity as walrus and caribou were skinned and gutted, passed along to the hunters first, and then the rest.

More than once, as he ate, Francis had absent-mindedly offered James a share. Snatched his hand back at once as though pricked.

He became, not long after, a nightly fixture in the hours before Francis slept. He had no books with him, and had taken to transcribing in a sodden notebook poor approximations of the fiction of his childhood: he could remember little but the barest plot and none of the poetic flourishes, but it kept his handwriting fresh and his mind occupied.

Francis did dream, of course. Most often of hauling. Not his compact sled, but the heavy boats that he and his men had dragged across the ice and rock for agonising, fruitless weeks. In his dream, the harnesses were empty except his, dead weight as he pressed forward against a bitter headwind that blew stronger and stronger until it sheared back the boat’s frost-white canvas. Francis always dreaded looking back at his haul. He wished, in his dream, that he would simply drive on forward, but every time he stopped, his eyes caught by the flap of the half-unhooked canvas, flailing like a drowning man tries to wave for help.

Sometimes his burden was the Tuunbaq, its great, awful, dying bulk, wheezing for breath and clawing wretchedly at the wooden sides of the boat.

Sometimes it was the bodies of his men, corpses all, a hundred or more, cold-eyed and dead and stacked as neatly and tightly as sardines to fit impossibly in the creaking hull.

Sometimes it was nothing at all.

He woke in a freezing sweat on those nights, already upright, his arms outstretched and his gloved fingers hooked as though he had been digging, scrabbling for something that wasn’t there.

James never tried to soothe him. “I’m sorry,” he would say quietly.

“What have you to be sorry for?” Francis demanded, breathless and out of sorts.

“For dying,” James said, pragmatically.

“Aye, for dying--” Francis murmured angrily, setting himself back on the hard ground with a thunk and turning his back to James’ gentle gaze. “And tell me how, Commander Fitzjames, am I to grieve for you dying if you insist on vexing me so?”

James’ voice seemed close by, when it came again. The wisp of bitter wind that slunk through his furs might have been breath on the back of Francis’ neck. “Perhaps I am too selfish to let you,” he said, and it sounded as though he were sadly smiling.

Francis would not turn to look.

He did not hear again from James that night.

*

Francis put as much stock in idle hope as he put in God; he knew they could not touch. It would break the illusion. James always kept a comfortable distance from him, walking at arm’s length or taking up no more than a corner of his iglu, as if to save Francis the embarrassment of putting out a hand and finding nothing more than air.

He had a meagre catalogue of James’ touches to call upon. There had been no kinship between them, in the early days. Plenty of stiff handshakes, nothing close to comradery. When hardship and the ice knocked free the wedge that had once been driven between them, physical touch was mostly borne of practicality: helping each up and over the colossal ridges of the pack, or the slippery smoothness of wind-battered shingle. More than once, Francis had let James lean on him heavily as he put him to bed, rendered weak-legged by the two fingers of gin he allowed himself - a limit he kept to as long as Francis was sober. He could hold his liquor fairly enough, but his stomach was increasingly empty. It hit him worse over time.

In the final days, there was something of comfort in their touch. Francis had seen some of the men avoid their sicker mates for fear of contagion, but he had no such superstition. The least he could do was let James hold his hand as he died.

“There was one--” James began, but Francis held up a hand to quiet him.

Yes, there was one intimate anomaly. Aboard _Erebus_ , where James had always felt most comfortable, the long dinner they had together the night before the ships were abandoned. The officer’s quarters were stripped bare and packed up, only the bulky furniture and Jacko’s empty cage left. They ate with spoons from tins; the decent crockery had all been stored. Francis remembered spitting a pellet of lead across the room. “Another timely reminder of our mortality,” he’d said dryly, and they had toasted to it with flasks of water.

There was laughter between them, even then.

He remembered the tired slope of James’ shoulders. How he kept his waistcoat open so that it would not hang on his slim chest. His hair, uncombed by anything but his fingers for days, looked sweat-frazzled and near burned at the tips. Francis knew how James loathed to be untidy, but in this hollow cabin, just the two of them, he could allow himself to let go of appearances for a moment or two.

He remembered--

James’ hand coming to rest on the table after a meaningless gesture. Just a flourish as he’d been talking. And his little finger landing on the farthest knuckle of Francis’ palm. He seemed not to notice. Francis made no move to nudge him away.

It was nothing more than that. A misplaced fingertip.

And then James swayed forward, his head so close it almost brushed Francis’ ear, and used the table to push himself up, standing abruptly. “To bed,” he announced. “A long day ahead.”

“And many more beyond that,” Francis had agreed.

His skin, just lightly, was tingling.

“I was cowardly,” James said now, and Francis did not know whether it was something he recalled James ever admitting, or whether it was his own thought in James’ voice.

“It was inopportune,” Francis argued.

Still--

Still, he could recall the shape of Sophia’s lips against his, and half wished, angry at his listless regret, that he could say the same of James.

*

Some of the hunters had urged him, in all earnestness, to take up a wife, and Francis had done nothing more than smile goodnaturedly at the idea; he was, though--

He was a man, and while certainly not in his prime, perhaps no more than a stone’s throw from it. He kept his own quarters within the village, he and James. There was nobody to disturb or offend but himself.

He had to do it in the warmth of his furs, of course, though he took off the glove on his right hand. His other arm he pressed across his eyes, though he could still feel the prickle of James’ gaze upon him.

“Turn your eyes,” he muttered aloud.

“To where?” came James’ wry response. “The wall and the ceiling are one and the same.”

“Turn your eyes, I said,” Francis bit, and shifted onto his side, his back to where he knew James was watching. It was as though he were abusing himself in a mirrored room, an unavoidable sense of voyeurism despite the lack of tangible company.

“Surely I was never this narcissistic,” Francis muttered miserably.

“Some of my bad habits rubbing off, I’m sure.”

“Christ, James,” he hissed, bucking into his palm, “don’t talk, it’s worse if you talk--”

“Then don’t ask questions of me,” James snapped back, some laughter in his voice, though he fell into silence, then. Just the wind rustling the heavy walls of the tent and the smothered sounds of Francis doing what was required.

He was not a young man, and release was some distance off.

Francis stroked himself until a low tension built in the backs of his thighs. Then even the wind seemed dulled, all quiet save for the rushing of blood in his ears. He could not hear James at all, not even the whisper of a breath.

“James?” he said, quiet.

“Francis,” came the reply. James sounded so close, almost atop him, though he could feel nothing but his own hand. “I’m here, Francis.”

“Stay.”

“--I’m here.”

*

He trekked out on the ice more days than not, needing to feel useful. Francis had not been a novice for a long time, not since he was a ship’s boy at tender thirteen, and though he found it bracing to learn, it needled his ego in sharp ways sometimes.

“Why don’t you go back?” James asked him as they trudged.

“Back? To London?” Francis snorted through his nose. “A fine court martial that would be.”

“You’d be welcomed, Francis. They should name a moon after you.”

“A crater, more like,” he scoffed. He thought on it a moment, one foot planting heavily in front of the other as he walked, and then felt that James was worth an earnest answer.

“We spent so long just surviving,” he said, looking out at the fathomless ice. The horizon was invisible in the distant fog. The sky was white, the ground white, the sun white, as though he hiked through nothing. “There’s a nobility in that, here. Nothing more is asked of a man than to survive.”

“Is that enough for you?” James asked. His tone lacked judgement. He was simply curious.

“Are you asking me,” Francis said slowly, “or am I asking myself?”

“Neither one nor the other,” James replied, smiling. “I hope it’s not me who keeps you here?”

“You always assume far too much self-importance, James.”

“Of course,” James said wryly. “How foolish of me.”

“Foolish of us both, I should say.”

Francis pulled his sled, his arms outstretched behind him, his chest leant forward to counteract the weight as he walked. His fur hood fluttered against his cheek in the driving wind, and his eyes were watery and cold, squinting against the pain.

James strolled beside him, handsome as he had ever been, unburdened.

But Francis did not mind the uneven load.

*

He did not mind, if James could be by his side a while longer.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe there's a crater on the Moon named after Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier.


End file.
